My Montana

My Montana

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Bird Sightings Shared Via eBird

I thought I'd share some of my Sunday activity with you. There are three of us assigned to work on Sundays at the Visitor Center, but two of us are plenty. So our boss lets one of us drive around the refuge. We can start as early as we want and only have to show up in time to relieve the others for lunch. I wasn't supposed to drive, but the automatic car used by the volunteers has to go to the shop. I share the truck I'm assigned with them, but it is a standard. Both the guys are learning to drive standard but the on-duty driver wasn't comfortable driving on our hilly route. So he offered the drive to me.

WOW! TWO Sundays in a row to play. Last Sunday I ended up spending two hours with eight bighorned sheep. This Sunday, I hardly saw any wildlife, even though I had left at 6:30A. M. So I ended up back in the headquarters area by 8:45 A.M.

I decided to spend a little time checking out the birds. The first ones I found were the yellow-headed blackbirds. The I found two young sora's. One of their parents remained hidden, but gave its loud call which is described sounding like a canyon wren on steroids. But the babies were just giving a one-note alarm call. I got both their pictures but had to shoot almost directly into the sun. Then I was able to catch one of several common yellowthroats sitting on a fence post with the sun on him.

Then, as I was driving down the road, I thought about our owl fledglings and looked to see if I could see them. I saw one brown blob, which turned out to be one of the babies, when I looked through my binoculars. I drove down the street by the bunkhouse and found four baby western kingbirds. We also have lots of Eastern Kingbirds but I didn't notice any babies.

But Monday, as I was walking up to close the gates, I noticed three eastern kingbirds on the fence across the road. As soon as I started walking on the road, one of them dive-bombed me. So I think those two left sitting on the fence were babies. Their future white fronts are still a little grey.

I copied and pasted the following directly from my eBird record I turned in Sunday.

Location

Natinal Bison Range Day Use Area, Lake County, Montana, US

Date and Effort

Sun Jul 14, 2013
8:45 AM

Protocol:

Traveling

Party Size:

1

Duration:

2 hour(s), 15 minute(s)

Distance:

0.5 mile(s)

Observers:

Marilyn Kircus

Comments:

N/A

Species

29 species (+1 other taxa) total

2

Great Blue Heron Ardea herodias

1

Red-tailed Hawk Buteo jamaicensis

3

Sora Porzana carolina

Age & Sex

Juvenile

Immature

Adult

Age Unknown

Male

Female

Sex Unknown

2

1

Ring-billed Gull Larus delawarensis

13

Rock Pigeon Columba livia

15

Eurasian Collared-Dove Streptopelia decaocto

3

Mourning Dove Zenaida macroura

1

Great Horned Owl Bubo virginianus

Note: The last time I took his picture, he was still a cotton top.

2

Downy Woodpecker Picoides pubescens

8

Northern Flicker Colaptes auratus

1

Western Wood-Pewee Contopus sordidulus

5

Western Kingbird Tyrannus verticalis

9

Eastern Kingbird Tyrannus tyrannus

5

Black-billed Magpie Pica hudsonia

13

Tree Swallow Tachycineta bicolor

5

Barn Swallow Hirundo rustica

2

Cliff Swallow Petrochelidon pyrrhonota

2

Black-capped Chickadee Poecile atricapillus

4

House Wren Troglodytes aedon

2

Western Bluebird Sialia mexicana

40

American Robin Turdus migratorius

2

Gray Catbird Dumetella carolinensis

7

Common Yellowthroat Geothlypis trichas

1

Yellow Warbler Setophaga petechia

11

Vesper Sparrow Pooecetes gramineus

7

Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoeniceus

2

Western Meadowlark Sturnella neglecta

6

Yellow-headed Blackbird Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus

3

Brewer's Blackbird Euphagus cyanocephalus

3

House Sparrow Passer domesticus

And here are a few more pictures from my birding time. Sometimes I get a little distracted by other creatures or plants.

A young teasel seed pod in the making

Yellow-headed blackbird

Cabbage white on huckleberry bloom

I decided to share my eBird record with you for a couple of reasons. One, I spent a lot of time entering my data and wondered if I could open the record up, copy and paste it and not have to re-upload the pictures I included. That answer is Yes. And I didn't have to retype any part of the record, either.

The other reason is to encourage you to share all your sightings through eBird. If, when you travel and stop to visit a location, just keep the records of what you saw there that day. Don't keep one list for several locations. This date is VERY valuable and each little piece is helping us understand the locations where species are flourishing or in trouble. Researchers looking for species of concern use the data to figure out where to find the species they want to study.

You have a great way to keep your own records and locate them at any time and from anywhere you can access the Internet. And with a smart phone, you can can enter your birds as you find them, in the field and don't need to carry a separate notebook and paper. Another asset is that your data is filtered by a sort of mechanical filter. It will ask you are if you are sure you saw a species or saw the numbers you reported. Then a human will check again and sometimes ask you for more details of what you saw or for pictures. Then, if you made a mistake and entered the wrong species, he will help you figure out what species you actually saw. This is a great learning tool for me and might also help you identify birds.

Entering multiple trips to your own favorite areas really fills out the life histories of each of the species of birds found there. This data helps give ever more accurate arrival and departure dates and can help us find out which species are being impacted by global warming. We can also see how a changing habitat is effecting the different species of birds.

After you upload your pictures - Flickr is perhaps the easiest now - you can just copy/paste the link to that picture. (I asked Google how to insert a picture in eBirds and the directions popped right up.)

And as an interesting side note: I met a lady who works in the Houston, Texas zoo. She is helping to raise Attwater Prairie Chickens for release back into their habitat. For an interesting video on the effort to save this species, click here. I have a very soft spot in my heart for these birds because the hardest volunteer job I've ever done was to spend a morning beating tall grass with a net to catch the grasshoppers. I think I only collected two or three gallons of bugs. That year, there were eleven hatches and each mom and babies ate a two-gallon container of bugs every two hours during the day. So it's a tremendous job to catch enough bugs for all the new babies.

And after all that hard work, I got to leave early and didn't have to close - my least favorite job on the refuge. A very good Sunday.